


Rebirth

by jacquelee



Category: Babylon 5, Orange is the New Black
Genre: Community: intoabar, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-15
Updated: 2015-04-15
Packaged: 2018-03-23 02:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3751108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquelee/pseuds/jacquelee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan Ivanova walks into a bar - to drink away her feelings about Talia - and meets Poussey Washington.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebirth

_I think I loved Talia. I think I loved Talia._

Whatever the Minbari got out of this ceremony, right now, Susan did not feel reborn, she felt awful. She had never been a fan of letting emotions out and admitting her love for Talia, to Delenn of all people, had been extraordinarily hard. It wasn’t even only because she hated admitting that the one time she had let her guard down it had led to her being betrayed, or because she wanted to appear tough and untouchable, it was mostly because she just didn’t want those feelings to be there at all. Because she didn’t know how to deal with them.

So she had bottled them up, suppressed them, buried them in a dark chamber of her heart. But now, amidst all the chaos, after giving up the one thing she had fought for her entire life, instead grasping on to the little straw of hope they had build here, she had wanted to really start new, to bring all these emotions out into the open so that she could finally let go of them. 

But it hadn’t worked. At all. Which was why she sat here right now, grasping a glass of vodka, not ready to return to her quarters, not ready to put on the shiny new uniform Delenn had left for her. She had been there, but she hadn’t been able to take it. For some reason, the uniform lying on her bed, all pretty and shiny and symbolizing a new future, a new hope, had made her even sadder, had made a new beginning seem even less possible. 

Because her first instinct was still always to share this with Talia. With someone who truly understood her. Sheridan, Garibaldi, Stephen, Delenn, they were her family, but for some reason, it had been different with Talia. Closer. She had always felt as if she shared something with Talia that none of the others even understood. Something special. 

And then they took her away. They poisoned everything with their lies. She hated them. She hated them and knowing that they had made Talia one of them, that the body and the face of the person she loved had been used as a vessel for their evil games made it all even worse. Of course, Bester had all but admitted that they killed her, which did make it better in some ways, because thinking of her as being dead was better than her being still alive but under their complete control. 

But she was still gone. And Susan still missed her. So much. That was why she was here now, drinking vodka after vodka, trying her hardest to feel relieved, to feel reborn and instead feeling even more trapped and hopeless than before. Whatever Delenn’s intention had been for this ritual, it was not working. She downed her glass and was about to call the waiter to get her another one when someone put another glass in front of her. 

“Vodka, neat, right?” 

Susan looked up, right into the eyes of a gorgeous short haired woman in a sleeveless grey shirt. She was already quite inebriated, but she definitely was sober enough to get a huge vibe from her radar. Well, maybe this was exactly the distraction she needed right now. At least that was what the sarcastic side of her told her. A quick shag to get all those emotions out of the way. 

She tried to smile invitingly, but wasn’t sure how well that turned out. 

“Thanks.” 

The other woman sat down next to her on the bar. 

“I just wanted to say thank you for saving all our butts. You’re a hero.” 

Susan let out a little snort. Yeah, right. Great hero, sitting here, getting drunk over a dead girlfriend and thinking of shagging a stranger just so she didn’t have to feel anything. She knew it wasn’t fair to beat herself up like this but hey, it was what she always did, so why would she change her MO now? She raised her glass. 

“To heroes. Whatever that means.” 

The other woman toasted with her own glass and then emptied it and put it to the side, while Susan for some reason stopped midway, and just stared into the glass, the clear liquid, the toothpick with a lonely cherry on it. It seemed to mock her, her inability to cope with things, her weakness. And she couldn’t bring herself to drink it. She just put her glass down again. 

“Whatever that means.” 

She repeated it quieter, more to herself. She took the toothpick and stirred the vodka, staring into the glass as if it held the answer to whatever question she was asking herself. 

“Hey, you wanna talk?” 

She looked up again, and the other woman smiled a little bit, interested, friendly, compassionate. This wasn’t what she had been looking for, she wasn’t one for deep emotional confessions to strangers in a bar, her style was more going for emotionless one night stands to dull the pain but there was something about this woman. 

Something that prompted her to not ask her back to her quarters but instead start talking. First the words seemed reluctant to come and they probably didn’t make much sense, but the woman just continued smiling, invitingly, as if listening to her in this moment was the one thing she had always wanted. She just seemed to understand everything without asking, without judging. And it made it easier. The words came more fluent and she found herself talking more than she had in a long time. Talking about things she never talked about with anyone before. 

About Talia, about the corps, about everything. For some reason it was really easy to open up to this stranger about all the things she had bottled up inside. Her childhood, her mother, even her biggest secret. Who the fuck cared that she was a latent telepath now? They had broken all ties with Earth, the corps, everyone. There was no need to hide anymore. 

The woman was a very good listener and to her surprise, Susan felt better and better the more she talked. It was as if she was finishing what she had started by telling Delenn that she loved Talia. As if the avalanche in her heart was now finally allowed to actually happen instead of always being pushed back into that dark place with more and more effort. 

And she found that, once she had gotten through the horrific part of Talia not being Talia anymore, it was far easier to talk about her as a person she loved. The times they spend together, the times that were good. Her heart seemed lighter with every memory surfacing, memories she had suppressed for what seemed to be an eternity because she had deemed them too painful. 

She didn’t notice how much time passed or what happened in the bar, the only thing that mattered was her and Talia and their memories. Telling all of this to a stranger somehow seemed like the most natural thing to do and it seemed to be the one thing that she really needed right now. 

At one point she was surprised to feel tears on her face. The woman had moved closer and somewhere Susan registered that she was asked if it was okay. She wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted or what was happening, but she felt a closeness to this woman that she hadn’t felt in a long time. 

Yes, it was okay. It was okay that the woman caressed her arm, it was okay that she held her in a hug that felt so natural she didn’t even consider that this was a stranger and that she normally rejected these kinds of closeness and emotional outbursts, especially in public. 

It didn’t matter right now. She had stopped talking, now she was just crying. All the pressure, all the pain, all the bottled up feelings somehow left her. Finally, in the arms of this woman she didn’t even know, she was able to let go. 

Maybe a new beginning was possible even for her.


End file.
